


variations on the word love (the homo sapiens remix)

by velvetcadence



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Domestic, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 16:56:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2075805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcadence/pseuds/velvetcadence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which everyone has small lives, nightmares, and a horror of mornings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	variations on the word love (the homo sapiens remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/gifts).
  * Inspired by [you heard the man you love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/418808) by [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red). 



> The original story was a poignant look at how everyone would be should they live non-powered, mundane lives. A very warm thank you to Red for the beautiful story.

“What would it be like,” he says, “Were we important men?”

It isn’t the first time he’s asked this. He has a habit of wandering through different lives you’ve never had, and in time you will think him dreamy and fanciful, but for now, you regard him seriously because you are young men now, as young as you both will ever be together, and it seems that the world could be at your fingertips if you only wanted to reach for it.

It is difficult to translate your thoughts into English, this damnable soft language of soft R’s and weak idioms.

Sometimes you wish Charles could simply pluck your thoughts from your mind like berries ripe for picking.

You keep your pace in deference to Charles’ wheelchair. You resent him for it sometimes, very quietly, sighing in empty air because life is difficult to people like him, and you resent the world for making him this way. You hate that Charles can only move so much in modern society—first floors, waiting outside the curb, selective, evenly-paved sidewalks.

However, there is dinner in your hand and a glimpse of Charles’ small, smiling mouth. Later, as you inevitably will, you will argue about ends and means, and you will smile too widely and love too deeply, you and he in a gentle, mundane kind of existence.

 

He always wakes up first in the mornings out of sheer necessity, to begin the ablutions and care of his insensate lower body. You doze off until he comes back to bed to wake you, and together you prepare to break your fasts: eggs on toast, tea for him, coffee for you only after a bout of nightmares.

It isn’t what you’d expected your life in America to be, but it’s something. The grand romance with the most enchanting man you’ve ever met—dates in coffee shops, circuits around town in low streetlights, chess in the park and long, winding discussions of politics—has petered into something soft and quiet and familiar. There’s satisfaction in taming your smittenness and a wistfulness to it too.

You never tell him what you do for a living because you find it shameful, odd jobs here and there, tasks they’d only give to suspicious men with strange, guttural accents. Charles never asks, English proper to the core, but something has to give and one day you’re fed up with all the _kraut_ insults and go back to school. Your English is abysmal still, at this point, but sign language is easier when you can just show Charles that you think he’s being a shit piece of swine without having to struggle with the translation or the way words never properly roll off your tongue.

Charles storms off to the bedroom, leaving you to fend for yourself on the couch, and it’s not the first time and it certainly won’t be the last.

But this is your life now, and life isn't all chocolates and roses. In the morning you’ll forgive each other. For now, you'll finish your coursework with a singleminded vehemence. Maybe, you think absently, you'll teach. 

 

He gives you a family over the years: a stepsister who does depressing art, a cousin who is all Xavier pomp and high society disdain. You don’t always like them, but you’ll be damned if you don’t love them.

Raven is troubled, always feeling displaced in her own skin. She wants so badly to be noticed, so she’s constantly dyeing her blonde hair different colors. This month it's a flaming red, cut short and slicked back to her head. She covers the scars on her wrist with bangles that clang every time she moves, but even that isn’t enough. She’s a curious mix of shy and attention-seeking, and it's difficult to convince her she's beautiful the way she is when she'd grown up invisible to her own stepmother and father.

"I wish my skin were blue," she says, her tears dripping off her chin as you crawl towards her on a floor covered in broken glass. "I wish I could turn into anyone I wanted to be. I wish I didn't have to be me."

There's nothing to say because you've both been here before. You can only hold her and let live.

 

There's a song from the sixties that keeps coming back to you. It brings back the smell of coffee, the quiet murmur of the sleepy cafe in the corner from where you lived, the downward fan of Charles' lashes as he contemplates checkmate.

" _I wanna hold your hand_ ," the radio sings. Your hands twitch as Charles knocks down his king.

"Well done," he smiles warmly. There's an ache in your chest as you smile back but keep your hand on the table, palm up, reaching out, wanting so badly for Charles to take it but knowing he won't. A love that dare not speak its name.

 

One day you'll tell Charles about the horror of the camps, about coming of age amongst skeletons and dead, hopeless eyes. The chill of your first winter there had settled and claimed your bones so that even a bit of cold makes them ache, and on your fifteenth anniversary, he gets you another turtleneck because he saw it at the window and thought you'd look fetching in it. It's good, warm material, and it says something about the both of you when you get him gloves in return even if you'd both agreed not to get each other anything. You tell him about testifying at the trial of the man at his camp years ago later, as you kneel at his feet with your head in his lap, telling him that part of you wanted to feel vindication, but the rest of you only felt numb, as if your mind was encased in metal. You'd never known Klaus Schmidt, not really, so imprisoning him felt like a hollow victory.

You still keep trying to shake the feeling that the event should be more significant than it doesn't feel, years after the fact.

 

"If we were important men," you find yourself saying, hand slotted neatly into Charles' own after needing to resign your first teaching job. They were saying terrible things about the state of yours and Charles' souls. "I'd build a school with you."

"And what shall we teach, my darling?"

"Things of consequence, I think. Independent learning. Activism. We'll tailor-fit our curriculum to the special needs of our students."

"That sounds wonderful."

"We'd call it the Xavier-Lehnsherr School for Gifted Youngsters. I think it has a certain ring to it, don't you?"

  

You'll fail many times in the course of your career, and you'll never quite lose the accent, but Charles will hold you every time you're laid off. You're making a difference in your students' lives, you know it—it's the adults that are the problem, these simpletons who've been fed drivel their entire lives and don't know how to think for themselves. They're afraid even if they needn't be. Sometimes you want to shake the very foundations of the city and make them _know_ true fear. They don't know how blessed they are, they don't know that from age thirteen you have had to undergo horrors they never include in textbooks: starvation, beatings, crippled growth, a loss of humanity, and that you're both envious and disgusted at how complacent America's children are. (You'll always think yourself German, no matter how long you live here.)

Kitty Pryde will recognize you when she's a parent herself, pushing a stroller along the grocery. She's one of the special few who have taken your words to heart, and the glow of pride from seeing her so successful will last for _days_.

 

Angel comes later into your lives after one of Raven's particularly bad episodes. She's a fierce woman for all that's she's five feet and two inches tall, but you figure she has to be in her line of work. Raven's enamoured with her, and it shows in her art. Angel has tattoos on her back in the shape of dragonfly wings, and every rendition, every angle of her is lovingly painted in vibrant tones. She's a character all her own, a tattoo artist with nothing to prove. When she's drunk, she slips into insect collectors homes and burns all of the dead pinned things.

You like her immediately, and you think that her pluck and fire will match Raven better than awkward Henry, who's been trying to court Raven to no success, even with Charles' blessing. Henry's brilliant, of course, but his career consumes him. The way he lives, sometimes, is reckless; it's as if he's trying to do everything at once before his spark of genius fails him. He's right, in a way. They find a tumor in his brain and he isn't the same afterwards.

 

"See," Charles says as the headlines all say the same thing: the Civil Partnership Act has been passed. 

His hand is warm on your nape. You could grieve for the lost time, but you're far too stern to. You've loved him your entire life and the Law is acknowledging it only now. Preposterous.

"When I moved in with you, this was illegal," you remind him.

"Will you marry me?"

"My dear Charles," you say, entirely unsurprised, folding the newspaper neatly in your lap. "I thought you'd never ask."

 

It never occurs to the both of you to have children, because it isn't something confirmed bachelors like you do. You wonder though, how it would feel to have a smaller version of Charles in your arms, chubby-cheeked with hair curling over his forehead. You've always had a fondness for children. If you married a woman you would have had three at the least. Mama would have wanted as many grandchildren as she could have, if she were still alive.

 

You remember again, the first time: the wind in your hair, the certainty of your fate, this high, if you jumped, with the waters rushing fast. If the height didn’t kill you, drowning certainly would. You never learned to swim. There’s beauty in these dark waters that’s entirely alluring, but there’s work to be done, and you aren’t destructive enough to fling himself off the bridge yet.

And he had walked so casually by into your life.

When you put the phone down after speaking to cousin Emma—she likes to whine about the doldrums of old age as she wheedles the promise of visits from you—Charles is in his study, poring over texts. It’s a mirror image of thirty-five years ago, except the Charles then had been slimmer with a head full of hair, but the way he holds the page is still poetry.

The image makes something in your heart ache. You remember something you read to him after a particularly bad fight, and it had been both apology and affirmation:

_Then there's the two_  
_of us. This word_  
_is far too short for us, it has only_  
_four letters, too sparse_  
_to fill those deep bare_  
_vacuums between the stars_  
_that press on us with their deafness._  
_It's not love we don't wish_  
_to fall into, but that fear._  
_this word is not enough but it will_  
_have to do. It's a single_  
_vowel in this metallic_  
_silence, a mouth that says_  
_O again and again in wonder_  
_and pain, a breath, a finger_  
_grip on a cliffside. You can_  
_hold on or let go._

What would it be like were we important men, he had asked, so long ago. You lean against the doorjamb and contemplate your life thus far, all its aches and pains and infinite joys, and know with a certainty that regardless of lifetimes you would have found him, or he you, and you would have slipped briskly into an intimacy from which you would never recover, time and time again.

**Author's Note:**

> Original prompt http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/6527.html?thread=10696831#t10696831  
> Margaret Atwood’s full poem http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/variations-on-the-word-love/  
> Ending quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald.


End file.
